


The World Is Theirs to Take

by elissastillstands



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Academy Era, F/F, Fluff, Getting Together, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 11:29:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15314520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elissastillstands/pseuds/elissastillstands
Summary: Kat Cornwell goes to Starfleet Academy and meets Philippa Georgiou. Things go a little downhill from there.





	The World Is Theirs to Take

**Author's Note:**

  * For [indiegal85](https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiegal85/gifts).



This is how it starts: they’re tangled together, and Pippa is scrabbling at the zipper of her uniform and laughing, and Kat kisses her and swallows down the happy sound, and she doesn’t even think about the stars waiting the both of them.

\-----

No, that’s a lie. This is how it starts: Kat’s drunk as a skunk and Georgiou is too, and somewhere between the third and fourth bottle of diluted Romulan ale, Georgiou becomes Philippa.

\-----

Except that’s a lie as well, because this is how it starts: Kat walks into the hallowed halls of Starfleet Academy fresh off of her master’s degree and ready to crush whatever the world throws at her, only to discover that her roommate is a fucking _dork_.

First-year cadets are required to have roommates, and since Kat didn’t know anyone else in her year, she had trusted her fate to the random assignment lottery. Philippa Georgiou seemed okay on paper: a year younger than Kat, enrolled straight from high school, registered for dual science and command tracks. She was squeaky-clean and academically motivated—at the very least, she would stay out of Kat’s way, and Kat would stay out of hers. No one said you had to be best friends with your roommate.

But when Kat presses her thumb over the bioscanner and unlocks the door to her room, she’s instantly accosted by sunshine and the hideous blue and red of the cadet’s uniform and bouncy hair. 

“Hello! You must be Katrina; it’s so lovely to meet you!”

It’s 0830 hours, and the woman’s goddamn cheery.

Kat blinks at room. Half of it, her half, is bare, and the other half looks like it came out of a recruitment brochure or some shit. There’s an actual _there’s no place like space!_ poster on the wall, alongside three other galaxy-themed monstrosities, two star charts, and an actual goddamn Old Earth telescope tucked away in the corner. There are multiple delicate-looking orchids on the windowsill. Georgiou herself looks like she also came out of a recruitment poster. Her uniform is flawlessly pressed, her smile is bright and shiny, her hair is perfectly curled, and her eyes are so big and starry that it looks like she’s from one of those uber-retro animated princess movies. 

The thing is, Kat’s done the whole college thing before. It’s gonna be a week until the orchids die, maybe two, and a month at most until the shine wears off and the posters come down. The whole bright-eyed, bouncy, and literal starry-eyed thing won’t last long.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Kat says flatly, setting her duffel on her bunk with a thump, and the light in Georgiou’s big brown eyes falls a little bit. 

Sue her. She’s not a morning person.

\-----

It does not wear off.

Kat realizes that maybe, just maybe, she was a little overhasty in her initial judgement of Georgiou, because if you’d asked her what kind of person the other woman is, she’d say that she’s the type to use colored highlighters. The type to go to office hours, every single time. The type to sit in the front row of every. Single. Class. 

Kat only knows this because she’s also going to office hours and sitting in the front row of all her classes, but that’s not because she’s an overenthusiastic neophyte; it’s because she wants to get curve-breaking scores and personalized recommendations for her first assignments when she graduates, since it’s never too early to start building connections. The point is, Kat wasn’t wrong about her impression of her roommate, she just oversimplified a little. Yeah, sure, Georgiou’s starry-eyed and optimistic and a little too in love with the idea of space—for evidence, see exhibit A: four space posters, two star charts, and _an actual goddamn Old Earth telescope_ —but beneath that enthusiasm is an ambitious streak a mile wide and the teeth-gritted determination to see that streak through to the bloody, bitter end. It’s something that makes Kat respect her a lot more.

She also swears at her orchids every morning. That also makes Kat respect her a lot more. 

Because they’re both on the combined science and command tracks, they’re in almost all the same classes: first year command strategy seminar, introduction to quantum programming, introduction to xenoculture, and intermediate warp mechanics. Kat’s three semesters ahead in xenobio since it was part of her psych major in undergrad, but from what she can tell of her roommate furiously making notes in the margins of her textbook, Georgiou is gunning for her. Georgiou is a year ahead in combat, and Kat’s half-considering putting in extra hours at the gym, just so she can have the petty pleasure of overtaking Georgiou in hand-to-hand courses.

But it's not like they hate each other. Whenever she hangs out with two of the cadets from her cognitive psych seminar, they complain about their roommates all the time. Gabe’s petitioning for a single, even though he and his roommate thought that they’d be okay after living together the previous year, and Afsaneh hides in the stellar mechanics library all the time. They ask Kat how she’s doing with her roommate, and she just shrugs. “We don’t talk.”

“Man, I get that,” Afsaneh says. “Cady’s such a nightmare whenever he opens his mouth, you know? I thought Aline from last year was bad, but Cady’s even worse.”

“She’s not a nightmare. Kinda preppy, sometimes, but pretty cool. We get along fine. It’s just—” Kat shrugs.

They aren’t friends, but they’re not exactly strangers either. They keep to their own sides of the room. Kat prefers to study at her desk, and Georgiou vanishes somewhere during the worst of the examination days. She sometimes comes back with extra coffee and sets it on their side table, and Kat does the same with the doughnuts she gets from the shop in the square. They quiz each other for their shared classes. They try to beat the stuffing out of each other on tests. It’s not like they talk, but they don’t—not-talk, either. 

It’s nice. It’s a little weird. It’s because Kat keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, and also because Georgiou probably still thinks of Kat as the asshole from orientation week who shot her down on everything.

Georgiou chooses that moment to practically skip by, her ponytail bouncing over her shoulder. She waves briefly at Kat’s table, and Kat nods at her. “That’s her,” she mutters. “Philippa Georgiou.”

Gabe and Afsaneh exchange a look.

“Oh,” Gabe says.

“ _Oh_ ,” Afsaneh says.

Kat stares at the both of them. “What? What is it?” she demands.

“Nothing,” Afsaneh says airly. “It’s just—oh.”

“What do you mean, 'oh’?”

Gabe crosses his arms and smirks at her. Kat rolls her eyes and reminds herself to get better conversational partners. She thought that she had struck the jackpot, when she found not just one but two people whom she liked enough to stick around, but she clearly needs higher standards. 

This non-non-friendship between Kat and Georgiou lasts until first semester midterms, when they’re paired up for the legendary hacking exam for quantum programming. Danson’s intensive class isn’t known as the worst science track weed-out for no reason—about 60% of the cadets drop it after the first exam, and only 20% leave the class with a passing grade. No one has gotten a passing grade on the midterm project yet. No-fucking-one. 

Georgiou grabs her by the arm after class and hisses, “We are going to ace this.”

“Damn straight,” Kat hisses back.

Except—they don’t. 

\-----

“Are you drinking?” Georgiou asks, letting herself into their room.

“What is it to you?” Kat asks, popping open her second bottle of diluted Romulan ale. She glances up at Georgiou from their couch. “Do you blame me?”

Georgiou snorts. “No. Do you blame me?”

“Nah.” 

“Where did you even get all this?”

“Hacked the replicator codes. I was gonna go out with Gabe and Afsaneh, but I didn’t want to.” Kat pauses. “Wanna drink with me?”

Georgiou shrugs. “Sure.”

Kat waves her hand at the bottles on the coffee table in a _help yourself_ sort of gesture, and Georgiou pours herself some vodka before going to the replicator and punching in the code for orange juice. “Pass that over,” Kat says after she sits down on the couch and tops her glass off. Romulan ale tastes like metallic backwash.

Georgiou does. They drink in silence for a while.

“This is pathetic,” Georgiou announces abruptly. Her voice is very loud.

Kat nods sagely. “Yeah. Yeah, it totally is.”

“It’s just one project.”

“Yep.”

“We’re making a big deal out of nothing.”

“Exactly.” Katrina holds her drink up to the light. Was there something floating inside? “My counsellor in college told me it would happen eventually. Apparently, you can't be good at everything forever, and you just have to get used to it.”

They drink some more.

Georgiou asks, “You went to university?”

“Yeah. Went—went two years early to get the hell out of dodge, did a combined undergrad and master's in psych in four years.” Kat picks at the label on her bottle. She feels tingly, and fuzzy, and mopey. “No one in my family thought that I’d ever come to shit, and I—I’ve done everything I could to prove them wrong.” Hell, maybe they were right, if she can’t even pass the fucking midterm to a fucking _introductory programming class_ —

“You’re at the top of the class, Cornwell,” Georgiou says. “You’re not nothing.”

Kat turns to look at her, and there it is, that shiny, bright _thing_ is filling her eyes again, except it’s not aimed at nebulas or quasars or whatever this time. It’s aimed at _Kat_ , and Kat half wants to storm out, because Georgiou doesn’t know jack _shit_ about her and isn’t remotely qualified to say what she is or isn’t, but the other half of her is grateful that Georgiou is telling her what she wants to hear. 

“Thanks, Geor—Georg—your last is too—” Kat hiccups, “—hard to say. Geor-gi- _ou_.”

Sweet fucking stars, when did she become a lightweight?

“You could call me by my given name,” Georgiou says. Her voice is a lazy drawl as she takes a swig from her cup, tilting her head back and flashing the curve of her neck. It isn’t fair, how some people look like they’ve just walked off the latest shoot for Vogue Rigel 24/7. 

Kat squints at her. “Are you even drinking? You don’t sound drunk.”

“Trust me, Cornwell, I’m drinking.” Georgiou finishes off her drink and chucks the empty bottle at the waste compressor. She misses by about three feet and glares at Kat when she giggles.

“If I call you by your first name, you have to call me by my first name,” Kat proclaims.

“Fine, then. Trust me, Katrina, I’m drinking.”

“I trust you, Phili—Phlip—your first name is hard to say, too,” Kat says accusingly. “Philp— _Pippa_.”

Pippa glares at her again. She’s cute as a button when she glares, and why hasn’t Kat noticed this before? 

“We could get back at him,” Pippa announces suddenly.

“Get back at—who?”

“Danson. You deserve a passing grade for the coding. He’s an asshole for grading us all unfairly. It wouldn’t take much of a protocol to hack the computers in his personal lab.”

Kat gapes at her. Holy shit, did Pippa care about her? Did Pippa care about her enough to hack a professor’s lab in revenge? “That’s such a bad idea,” she says, almost wonderingly, and she swings her bottle in Pippa’s direction and giggles when the other woman swats at her arm. “We are—we are not going to—hack Danson’s programing lab.”

“We absolutely could,” Pippa says, and Kat realizes, holy shit, she is dead serious. “I mean, his testing sim was all about hacking enemy systems, and what better way to prove our competency than to hack an actual enemy system?”

“You are so _drunk_ ,” Kat says.

“Yes, and I am determined.” Pippa turns to Kat, her eyes ferocious. “I’m going to do it.”

“Wait—wait though,” Kat says, swaying as she gets to her feet. She brandishes her drink at Pippa. “That’s illegal. You could get kicked out.”

“I’m a very good programmer; I won’t get _kicked out_ —”

“But you could. And then I’d have to find another—another roomie. And I don’t want another roomie.” Kat taps her fingers against her lips. “Write it first. And then—and then when you’re sober, you can decide—to run it or not. You shouldn’t operate a hovercar while drunk, so you really shouldn’t—” she hiccups again “—commit crimes while drunk.” She grins when she finishes her sentence. “Maybe you’re right, Pippa, I’m super smart at planning—”

“Shut up, Katrina, or I’ll record you right now and show it to you in the morning.” Pippa rummages for her PADD and settles into her seat. “You wanna help?”

\-----

Kat wakes up on the couch with the worst hangover she’s had since the day after she defended her thesis. “Wha’?”

“Good morning, Cornwell,” Philippa says brightly. “You probably want to see this.” She shoves her PADD in Kat’s direction.

Kat bats vaguely at the PADD, fumbling at the brightness controls.

There’s a sound from Philippa’s direction which might almost be a laugh, and then a hypo lands on the table next to Kat’s hand. “Thanks, roomie,” Kat mutters, pressing it to her neck and hissing in relief when the pounding in her head clears. She finally looks over at the PADD and scans the coding on the screen. She barely remembers huddling next to Philippa and laughing as they draft a protocol that would make Frederick Danson’s lab—

“Holy shit,” Kat breathes, jolting upright. “We didn’t run this, right?”

“I think you talked me out of it.” Philippa says, leaning over Kat’s shoulder and scrolling over the code. “We’re damn good coders, even when smashed, you know. This would probably work. Although our revenge scheme could be a little more subtle; getting his computers to black out and blast ‘90s music for 24 hours straight is a tad tacky.”

And to think that she’d thought that the other woman was a squeaky-clean try-hard. “You’re a menace to society, Georgiou,” Kat says, laughing a little.

“I got drunk on your terrible replicated Romulan ale. You should probably call me Philippa.”

\-----

Georgiou becomes Philippa. She’s so much more annoying after she becomes Philippa.

“I don’t get it,” she grouses at Afsaneh. Kat's dragged her out to watch the Academy dance team rehearse, because how else was she supposed to understand how annoying Philippa is? Philippa is currently pirouetting across the stage, perfectly graceful. “She’s a nerd. I’ve watched her study, she gets excited over fucking star mapping, how does she fucking _do that_ —”

Kat’s self-proclaimed friend is too busy laughing her ass off at something to appreciate Kat’s suffering. What the hell is so funny to her, anyways?

It’s annoying, because Philippa is suddenly everywhere now, being competent and smart-ass and so goddamn cheerful. She's at Kat’s lunch table, trading tips on eating vegetarian with Afsaneh and letting Gabe try bits of her food. Afsaneh thinks she's sweet and a little full of herself. Gabe thinks she's the best thing since non-replicated sliced bread and takes to asking her about sparring techniques constantly.

“Gabe,” Kat calls after him one day after class. She waits until he turns back to face her and then mutters in his ear, “Don’t you dare lead her on.”

“Lead her—” Gabe blinks at her. “Lead her on? Wait, are you talking about Philippa?”

“Yes, I’m talking about Philippa. I’m glad that the two of you are getting along well, but—”

Gabe laughs. “Oh God, no, Kat.”

“Really?”

“You’re barkin’ up the wrong tree here. We’re just friends. She’s a lesbian—thought you knew that already.” A speculative glint enters Gabe’s eyes. “I was thinking about introducing her to some of the girls in the jazz ensemble, though. She likes jazz, and they certainly wouldn’t mind getting to know her—”

“I don’t even know why you’re in jazz ensemble,” Kat huffs, She tries to keep her face from showing her combined embarrassment and relief, but her complexion is conspiring against her. “You sound like a dying albatross whenever you play.”

She’s misread people more in the last month than she has in the last six years of her life. It would be mortifying, if it weren’t for the fact that Kat is well aware that she hasn't ever exactly been Ms. Congeniality. Whoever let her major in research psychology before she could legally be considered an adult had made a huge mistake, because she has two degrees in how people’s brains work but doesn’t have the slightest inkling of what to do when she has three actual people in her life and she just wants them all to be happy.

Stars, they should have classes in this. How to navigate casual interpersonal relationships. It’d be a hell of a lot more practical than—whatever warp model she’s currently trying to reconstruct.

“You know what this is called?” Afsaneh asks after Philippa runs off from their study table because she’s late for her sparring practice. Kat is allowing herself the luxury of banging her head a few times on the table. She hasn’t gotten a single mechanics problem done the whole night.

“No. Do enlighten me.”

Afsaneh leans in real close to Kat’s ear and whispers, “Sexual frustration.”

Kat swats at her with a spare PADD. Afsaneh grins and props her legs up on the table, balancing on the back two legs of her chair. “What’s keeping you back?”

“Only the little fact that, oh right, she has no interest in me whatsoever,” Kat says through her teeth.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. For sure.”

“No, you don’t.”

No, she doesn’t. “You don’t know me, Paris,” Kat says, poking half-heartedly at her PADD. That’s more of a lie than she’d like it to be. Afsaneh Paris, with her pretty earrings and perfect hair and picture-ready moms in Ahvaz who send her sweets from their family-owned bakery every two weeks because she complains that there’s no place in San Fran that makes good saffron brittle, who says things like _de-hierarchializing the Federation's policies for providing medical aid to secondary member planets_ with a perfectly straight and earnest face—she’s exactly the sort of woman Kat would’ve hated back in college. But she’s told Afsaneh more about her life than she’s told anyone in recent memory, and Afsaneh shares food with her and gives really nice hugs and says the things Kat thinks but doesn’t really want to say out loud. She can’t hate Afsaneh.

“You should take chances for your own happiness,” Afsaneh says.

“You think I don’t want to?” Kat asks. “I’m not going to ruin one of the most stable relationships— _thing_ s—I’ve had in the last decade ‘cause I think a girl’s hot. I’m not that stupid. I have priorities.”

“Look, I’ve told you what I think about your chances, but you don’t believe me on that. Just—trust me on this.” Afsaneh’s voice is way too gentle for this conversation. “She’s not going to hate you, Kat.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Afsaneh takes the PADD from her hands and sets it aside before hugging her tightly. “None of us are going to hate you.”

Her immediate instinct is to repeat herself— _I don’t believe you_ —but she knows that Afsaneh wouldn’t like it if she says that again, so Kat lets herself be hugged with only minimal grumbling. 

\-----

The thing is, the first solo command sim is meant to suck. Everyone knows that. Danson’ll fail you, and Chi’Mda’s sim will break your soul into a billion tiny pieces. You’re not supposed to do well. If you come out of it feeling like you won, you probably aren’t fit for command.

That doesn’t mean that anyone was fully prepared for how much it truly, truly sucks. 

Kat is one of the first called, so she gets out early and waits outside the sim room for Philippa to finish. She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes to stop the hot, itchy warmth threatening to crawl up. She’s still shaking and sweaty. The door of the room opens, and Philippa steps out, her face pallid. She slowly walks over to stand next to Kat. Her eyes close, and she lets her head fall against the wall with a _thunk_.

“What’d you do at the end?” Kat asks her. Not _how did you do_ , because they all did the same: terribly.

“Ran back into the settlement to save as many as I could. The bird-of-prey bombed the outcropping, transmitted the intel back to the Star Empire, and destroyed the neighboring settlements. They played recordings of the fucking distress calls. Ten thousand lost.” Philippa doesn’t open her eyes. “How about you?

“Went to the comm tower, jammed the bird-of-prey’s signal so it veered off-course and couldn’t transmit the intel, but the entire settlement died. Neighboring settlements still got destroyed.” Kat can still hear the distress calls in her head, people screaming for help, like audio from a glitching holovid.

They stand in silence until Kat’s comm goes off. “Gabe and Afsaneh have been waiting to have dinner with us. To celebrate our survival, apparently.”

Philippa detaches herself from the wall, shaking her head slowly as if to clear the sounds out. “Yeah. That’ll be good.”

After the late dinner, they quietly walk back to their dorm and get ready for bed in mutual unspoken agreement that jack shit is going to get done tonight. They settle in their beds, and Kat calls for the computer to turn the lights off. The room goes dark. The sounds of cadets laughing as they go out into town filters in through their window.

“Do you think it’s worth it?” Kat asks suddenly, rolling over so she’s looking in Philippa’s direction. “All—that? For this?” She doesn’t need to clarify, because she knows they’re both thinking about the same thing.

Philippa’s silent for a moment, and Kat can hear the rustling of her covers as she turns to face her. “Yes. A thousand times yes,” she says, and Kat smiles a little at the earnestness of her hyperbole. Philippa pauses and then asks, “Do you?”

Kat closes her eyes. “Yeah. I do.”

“Why did you enlist?”

Her voice is soft and curious. Kat considers her answer. She thinks about being thirteen in a tiny town in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere and seeing flyers for Starfleet, and taking one. She remembers her family laughing, because Starfleet was for the best and brightest, and Kat Cornwell ain’t any of those. “Spite,” she says at last.

Philippa stifles her giggle. 

“What? It’s a perfectly valid reason for doing things.” Kat shifts around on her pillow. “Spite. Restlessness. Just feeling like—”

—like there was more out there than finishing college at twenty and a PhD at twenty-two and running out of things to prove and then whittling her life away without doing anything that mattered. Feeling like she could make a difference, like it wasn’t just hubris or arrogance, to think that she build a home with others who didn’t have a lot on the ground, and that they could work together and unite a galaxy and help people across the quadrants. Like there really was a big picture she could draw, like she could do good somewhere, for real. 

“—like there’s more,” Kat finishes belatedly. Stars, is she really any less of an idealist than Philippa?

It’s probably stupid, to hope that they won’t ever have to deal with anything as disastrous as the sim while they’re in command—but Kat knows that Philippa was born to sit in a captain’s chair and tell her crew to punch it, and Kat herself isn’t going to stop until she has that admiral’s pin on her chest. If disasters are going to happen, if shit always goes wrong when people try to go boldly, then Kat wants to be at the head of it, figuring out how to save as many as possible. 

Philippa makes a _hmm_ -ing noise. “I get that.”

“How about you?”

“That telescope’s been in my family for generations.” Philippa flips over on her bed so she could look out the window, at the sliver of night sky visible above the rooftop. “I was six the first time I snuck it out from our cabinet and used it to look up at the sky. I couldn’t see a single thing, and I was still fascinated.” Kat can hear her sigh. “It’s just—there’s so, so much to explore out there. There are people thousands and thousands of light years from us that we can talk to now, isn’t that—incredible? It’s worth any risk.”

Kat laughs, and she can feel it in her belly. “Sweet stars, Georgiou, you’re so in love with space, it’s—” hopelessly naive, so precious that it makes a sweet ache trickle through her chest, “—kinda cute,” Kat says, and she cringes the moment the words leave her mouth.

“Shut up, Cornwell,” Philippa says, but she’s laughing too. 

“You’re a cheeseball.”

“Do you have a point?”

“No wonder you can’t keep a girlfriend, she has to compete with flaming balls of gas in a vacuum—”

“Gods, Kat, shut up.” Philippa giggles. “I’ll find a girl who can love the fact that I love space. There. Problem solved.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Thanks,” Philippa snorts. She pulls the covers over her head. “Goodnight, Kat.”

If Kat ever finds out that any of Philippa’s girlfriends ditched her because she talks about orbital mechanics too much, Kat’s gonna make sure that the woman gets rejected every single time she uses her credit chip until the end of her life, because the expression Philippa Georgiou gets on her face whenever she talks about space is the single most beautiful thing in the Alpha Quadrant.

“Goodnight, Philippa,” Kat says quietly, and she lays awake for a long, long time. 

\-----

“You could come with me.”

Kat gapes at Philippa. “What?”

Philippa’s halfway through packing to go back home to Malaysia for winter break. She had asked Kat what she was doing for winter break, and Kat shrugged and told her that she was probably staying on campus. Who wants to go back to rural Illinois for anything? Certainly not her. She hasn’t said a civil word to her family in six years, and she isn’t going to start now.

“I mean, if you aren’t doing anything with Gabe, or Chris and Afsaneh, of course,” Philippa says. She’s already reaching for her PADD. “My family has a spare room in our apartment, and they already love you. Don’t get a big head about that, though, they’re just happy that I have actual friends over here.”

“I—uh—”

“You can swim, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“We don’t do Christmas, but if you miss it too much, we could probably take a transport to Kuala Lumpur for a day. Or for the little new year in January, the projected fireworks there are awesome—”

“I don’t want to, uh—impose,” Kat says weakly.

“You’re not imposing on anything, Kat,” Philippa says. “Look, no one should be alone for the holidays.”

Christmas alone is a lot more fun than Christmas with other people, in Kat’s humble opinion, but Philippa sounds like she believes what she’s saying, and Kat doesn’t have the heart to rebuff her. 

“It’ll be fun. We’ll go to the beach and relax and stuff.”

Philippa’s eyes are doing that _thing_ where they get huge and shiny and hopeful, and Kat, quite literally, is not strong enough. She finds herself nodding, and the wattage of Philippa’s smile increases tenfold as she turns away and flicks on her PADD to call her family. An older woman with Philippa’s nose and jaw and smile answers, and Philippa starts talking excitedly. Kat can make out the syllables of her name in the quick conversation that follows.

This is a bad idea. This is such a bad idea. This is the opposite of relaxing. 

A day later, they step off of a shuttle out into blinding sunlight.

“Welcome to Langkawi,” Philippa announces.

The shuttleport opens right out onto a beach. The sand is hot, and the postcard-blue water of the sea stretches all the way to the horizon. Philippa sets down her duffel and grins at Kat, and she—oh, sweet hell—strips off her jacket and pants on the spot to reveal a bright teal one-piece. Kat’s eyes feel like they’re about to fall out of her head. This is so much better than spending the holidays alone. Wait, no, this is so, so much worse. 

“Stalls are over here. You have sixty seconds to get changed, or else I’m gonna drag you in there in your cadet blues, Cornwell.”

“Wait—aren’t we—your family—” is all Kat manages to say. She still can’t look away from Philippa in the swimsuit. 

“They know I always go swimming when I first land, they’ll meet us here, _come on_.”

“But—”

“It’s the beach, Kat! I’ve been thinking about this for months.” Philippa runs off, her hair flying in the wind. Kat remains frozen, staring after her.

Sweet fucking stars, this was such a bad idea. 

\-----

“Una.”

“No.”

“Thrik’li En-Mit.”

“What? No, she's already married, and—wait, that's not even the _point_ ,” Philippa groans. “Kat, I already told you, I don't need any help getting a date for the February gala. You’re not gonna mastermind your way into it this time, forget about it.”

Kat ignores her, because Philippa is clearly lying, and if Kat herself isn’t going to be Philippa’s plus-one to the ‘Fleet’s annual Academy ball, then she’s damn well gonna to make sure that Philippa’ll go with the most smoking girl at the Academy. Philippa isn’t thrilled with her efforts—if anything, she seems to be getting more agitated the more names Kat throws at her. Her face is pinched and her arms are crossed, which is exactly how she looks whenever their xenoculture instructor says something she doesn’t like.

“Kathy.”

“No.”

“Oh, I know! Winnie. She’s your type. Engineering cadet, blonde menace, can hotwire anything she gets her hands on—”

“Fucking hell, for the last time, Kat, no.”

“Oh c’mon, Philippa,” Kat says, leaning close. “Let me set you up.”

Philippa glares at her wordlessly.

“You should have a nice date.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that I don’t want a nice date?”

“Why don’t you want to go with any of them?

“I don’t have a thing for any of them.”

“You don’t need a thing for any of them, it’s just the gala—”

“I don’t have a thing for any of them because I have a thing for _you_ , Cornwell!” Philippa bursts out.

Kat gapes at her. She wouldn’t be able to form coherent sentences right now if her life depended on it. 

Philippa? A thing? 

For her?

Philippa must’ve mistaken her silence for disapproval because she squares her jaw, thrusting her chin up into the air. “You’re brilliant, and you’re hot, and you’re my roommate. I didn’t tell you because I thought it would go away after a while, but you undoubtedly know about it at this point anyways, and you still just have to mocking me about it, and that starts to sting after a while—

“—wait no, Philippa, I never—”

“—and then you, what? Try and set me up? Doesn’t that just seem a little mean to you?” Philippa is red-faced and indignant now, but her hands are shaking ever so slightly, and her breath is coming fast, and Kat realizes with a start that she is scared. Philippa Georgiou, who had the guts to try and hack a Starfleet professor for an asshole roommate she barely knew, is scared, and that shocks Kat into talking. 

“Philippa—” Kat starts. She has to swallow past the hard lump in her throat before saying, “I have a thing. For you. Too.”

Now it’s Philippa’s turn to freeze. “Are you—are you lying? Are you just saying that to make me feel better? Because that’s even more of an asshole move than all your other moves, combined.”

“No. No, I’m not lying. I—I like you. A lot.” Sweet fucking stars, Cornwell, get it together. But she can’t, she actually can’t, the words are pouring out and she can’t do anything to stop them, “I just never thought that you would—I didn’t think—I really, really love that you love space,” Kat says helplessly. “I think it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”

It’s completely silent in their room for what seems like an eternity.

“You—you dork,” Philippa finally splutters. 

Her facial contortions are unreadable at this point. Kat is going to bolt in about five seconds and then break into the theoretical quantum labs, because controlled time travel has to exist somewhere. Fuck that, she’ll take uncontrolled time travel at this point. Jettisoning herself back to pre-warp Earth would be preferable to staying here. “Please, Philippa, I’m sorry, please, please, please don’t—”

Philippa takes a step towards her, and Kat realizes that she’s smiling. She’s smiling, and Kat thanks every star in the goddamn universe. 

“You _dork_ ,” Philippa repeats happily.

She crowds in close and leans up on her tip-toes to kiss her, and Kat kisses her back, wrapping her arms around her shoulders and drawing her even closer.

\-----

Everything changes. Kat can't look at Philippa without smiling like a fool. Nothing changes. They've been rooming together for months and friends for nearly as long, so there's no need for the awkward get-to-know you stage. The fact that they live together is fantastically convenient for sex, even if it's a little mortifying that Philippa's taken to writing their nights in together on her planning schedule, alongside weekly programming quizzes and dance rehearsals.

Afsaneh and Gabe coo at them constantly. It's like having a chorus of pigeons following them around for a couple weeks.

Their first fight is about quantum physics, which is as expected. Except it's not really about quantum physics at all. Kat and Philippa are talking about interdimensional theorems, which isn't unusual, but Philippa makes a mistake, which is way less usual, and Kat does something she's never done before in her life.

She doesn't point out that it's wrong.

Philippa catches her error about five minutes later. “Wait, Kat, hang on a second. I dropped an entire constant here—wait. Shit. Didn't you notice this? You were right this whole time about the flux variable.”

“I—” Kat clears her throat. “I didn't notice it, no.”

Kat is the worst liar in the Federation. Philippa stares at her like she's a stranger. “Kat, if you knew, why didn't you just tell me that I was wrong about the—”

“I didn't want you to get angry.”

Philippa stares at her, visibly confused. “What?”

“I didn't want to argue with you because I didn't want you to get angry, okay? It's just a little math error, and I didn't think that pointing out your mistake was worth you leaving or something—”

“Me leaving or something—you lied because you thought I would leave you over a math error?” Philippa's voice is loud and high.

Kat wants to scream. This is exactly what she didn't want to happen.

“So you don't trust me,” Philippa says. 

It's not a question, not the way she says it now, and it makes Kat’s stomach drop, and no, no, _that's not the fucking reason—_ “That's not what I thought!” 

“You don't trust me! How the fuck am I supposed to know that you're not lying about everything when you don't—”

“Fucking hell, it's not all about you, Philippa! I was just trying to make it easier on us—”

“By lying?”

“By making you happy! You like being right, I know how you work. You like it when you're the fucking smartest person in the room—”

“I just want the truth—”

“You just want to be right, you don't care about anything else!” Kat's breathing hard from shouting, and she realizes that Philippa is very still and very quiet, and shit, no, _no_ , that wasn't even true, that wasn't what she'd meant to say at all.

Philippa turns on her heel and walks out of their room, and Kat slowly sinks down onto the couch, covering her face with her hands.

It's a couple hours later when Philippa knocks on the door. “Can I come in?” she calls.

Her voice sounds as tired as Kat feels. “Yeah,” Kat calls back.

The biometric scanner beeps, and Philippa steps into the room. “I'm sorry,” she says. She slowly walks over and sits down on the couch, at the opposite end from Kat. “For yelling at you. And for saying that you don't trust me.”

Kat looks down at her lap. “I'm sorry, too. For yelling at you, and for saying that shit about you.” She sighs through her nose and rubs at her face, feeling like she’d just run a marathon. It's too quiet. It's not supposed to be quiet in their room. They've always been arguing over something or another, even when they weren't friends.

“I just—I don't want anything to change,” Philippa says at last, and she sounds miserable, wiping at her nose with the back of her hand. “I—I really like you, and I was scared that our relationship was messing with what we had in the first place—”

“Hey,” Kat says. She holds out her arm and nods at Philippa. “C’mere.”

Philippa immediately scootches over and tucks herself into Kat’s side, tangling her fingers in the fabric of her shirt. Kat lets her hand fall on Philippa’s back, feeling her hitching breaths.

“I really like you, too,” Kat says after a while. “I just don't want you to leave.”

They sit in the quiet for a long time. Philippa’s hands never loosen from Kat's shirt.

“I'm not going to go anywhere,” Philippa whispers. “No matter what happens. I'm not going to hate you for being yourself. I'm not going to leave. You don't have to believe me yet, but I promise.”

Kat rests her chin on top of Philippa’s head and exhales shakily. She's not good at believing in people, but she's working on it.

\-----

San Fran isn't exactly known for its balmy weather, and the first three weeks of April are unseasonably cold and drizzly, casting a pall over the entire Academy. Kat approaches Philippa where she slouches at the window, staring out at the gray of the campus in rain.

“Coach’s gonna put you in the back if she ever sees you standing like this,” Kat teases, tickling her fingers lightly up Philippa's spine.

Philippa glares at her out of the corner of her eye. “I'm not dancing right now, am I?”

Kat drapes her arms around Philippa's waist and looks over her shoulder at the buildings barely visible through the fog. “You seem down.”

“I'm not down.”

“Gloomy.”

“I'm not gloomy; I'm fine, Kat. It's just—” Philippa puffs out her cheeks in a sigh. “They cancelled the open hours for the observatory again. And the rain here is so boring.”

“Boring?” Kat snorts. “I mean, I get that it's been going on for a while, but I'm a little offended on behalf of our rain.”

“We have monsoon season. Big clouds that look like they came out of holos. Wind. Torrential rain. You could hear it on the roof and in the gutters, this drumming noise that almost shakes the apartment. This is just, like—fog that got a little too confident.” She sags against the windowsill. “You can't even hear anything.”

“We used to have huge thunderstorms back in Illinois,” Kat says, leaning her head on Philippa's shoulder. “Listening to the rain and thunder when everyone else is sleeping—it's kind of a magical feeling.”

“I love that sound. I wanted to play in the rain all the time when I was little, but my mom never let me. Said I'd catch my death out in the cold.”

“You ever tested her hypothesis out?”

Philippa turns away from the window. “I'm pretty sure that scientific principles have disproved her well enough,” she says, brushing her lips against Kat's cheek before returning to the essay drafts strewn all over her table.

They're walking home from the library when the sky thunders suddenly. The rain starts pouring down in earnest, clattering on the metal rooftops and soaking through their clothes in seconds. It fills Kat's mouth and makes her vision blur for a few seconds before she blinks the water away. There's yelping from down the road as cadets run for cover. Kat wipes her wet hair out of her face and glances at Philippa, who is standing in the middle of the walkway and beaming up at the clouds. Her hair is wet and stuck to her face every which way, and water is streaming down her forehead and nose and cheeks. “Is this more like it?” Kat calls over the rumbling in the distance.

Philippa turns to look at Kat, and she's still beaming, and Kat smiles back. 

“Yeah,” Philippa says. “Yeah, it is.”

It's such a cliche, kissing in the downpour, but sometimes, when Philippa Georgiou is staring at her like she's something on par with the clouds and the thunder all around then, Kat thinks that cliches are only appropriate. She sucks the water off of Philippa's lips, and Philippa's hands come up to cradle her head, carding through the mess of her waterlogged hair. Kat runs her fingers over Philippa's shoulder blades and feels them flex beneath her touch, and her hands rest on Philippa's lower back, slipping just under the wetness of her drenched uniform to feel the warm skin underneath.

\-----

“You called me Pippa, that first time we got drunk,” Philippa murmurs against her neck. 

They're hot and sticky and sweaty, and Kat considers getting up to open a window or mess with the temperature controls, but she's too happy to move outside of stroking Philippa’s hair. “Sorry ‘bout that. Alcohol makes me bad at words.”

“I didn’t say that I minded.”

Kat brings her arms to rest on Philippa’s back. “Okay—Pippa,” she says softly.

\-----

“What’re you getting her?” Gabe asks, poking at the display of red roses in front of them.

Kat rubs at her temples. The damn things are multiplying before her eyes, like tribbles but worse, all red and smelly and so goddamn cheerful. “I don’t know,” she grits out at last. 

Gabe gingerly picks up a bundle of a dozen roses and holds it out in her direction, waggling his eyebrows. Kat rolls her eyes and shoves the bouquet back into the display. “Pippa doesn’t even like roses.”

“Philippa Georgiou told you her favorite flowers?”

“Yes.”

Gabe stares at her flatly. Kat rolls her eyes. “It’s an—educated guess. And I definitely hate them, so. No roses.”

“What’s her favorite food?”

“Fried bananas, apparently.”

“Okay then. This is San Fran, Kat, there’s gotta be a store that sells those somewhere.” Gabe pulls out his PADD and starts typing one-handed. “What’s her favorite color?”

“Uh—blue? Purple? Something space-y?”

Gabe glares at her. “‘Something space-y’? Really? How long have you been dating her?”

“Barely three months!”

“Okay, okay, let me rephrase. How long have you been moonin’ after her?”

“ _Mooning_ _after_ —sweet fucking stars, Gabe, this isn’t 20th century Virginia.” Kat crosses her arms. Who the hell cares if she doesn’t know Pippa’s exact favorite color? She knows about the tree where Pippa hid when her siblings were arguing, and the beach where she swam, and the things she dreams about finding between the stars. She’s seen Pippa dance, and get drunk, and grumble her way through a hangover. She knows that Pippa loves to the point where it sometimes hurts, and that she’s wanted to go into the black ever since she was old enough to look up and wonder. 

“Kat, look. You know her,” Gabe says. “Just follow your gut.”

Kat takes a deep breath. Her gut has lead her to some truly horrendous places with her past dates, but this is Pippa. If Kat plans a shit birthday for her, they can laugh about it together. “Okay. I’ll get her a present, and I’ll grab some takeout from whatever restaurant you’re looking up, and we’ll climb onto the top of the Hamlan Observatory and have a picnic and stargaze. There. That’s my strategy.”

“Well then, there you go, Cap’n. Go at it.”

Kat snaps her fingers at him. “The address, Cadet. I need that address, pronto.”

“Aye aye, Cap'n,” Gabe snickers.

\-----

“—and I simply refuse to believe that McKinley is a fully qualified xenocultural instructor,” Pippa rants, walking over to her desk and throwing down her stack of PADDs. “His definitions are horrifically skewed, insensitive at best, and reeking of 22nd century extremist human supremacy at worst. I can’t believe he’s still on the faculty. I actually can’t. I read an article of his, and I wanted to claw my eyes out just at his abstract—” she breaks off when she looks over at Kat. “Wait, what is it?” Her shoulders relax, and a smile twitches at the corners of her lips. “Stop looking at me like that, it makes me lose my streak of righteous fury—”

“Can’t I smile at my girlfriend?” Kat asks, raising an eyebrow. She holds out the gift-wrapped package from behind her back and clears her throat. “Happy birthday, Pippa.”

“I—what?” Pippa asks, her eyes going wide. “No, Kat, you didn’t have to get me anything, I don’t even celebrate birthdays—”

“Well,” Kat says, glancing down at her regulation boots, “I want to celebrate it with you. If you want.”

“Kat—”

Pippa’s frozen for a moment, and then she launches herself at Kat and hugs her tightly, crushing the present between them. Kat yelps, laughing as she extracts the package from the tangle of their arms. “Careful with that, Pippa, I don’t think you’d forgive me if I squished a 21st century constellation map.”

“ _A constellation map_?” 

The words are practically a screech, and Kat doesn’t think she’d be able to stop laughing if she tried. She watches while Pippa carefully peels the vintage-style wrapping paper from the poster case and unrolls the map, poring over the delicate shading of the fantastical animals drawn between the inked stars. She insists on hanging it up on her wall before going anywhere else.

They walk up to the observatory hand-in-hand and climb up to the rooftop level. There’s a table laid out with takeout containers and a couple holocandles, and a vase of luminous peonies and orchids sits at the center. Kat chokes a little and plucks out the note nestled between the blooms. _Go get it!!!!!! ;)_ is scrawled there in terrible handwriting, replete with six exclamation points and a winking text emoticon.

“You,” Kat mutters, trying not to blush, “were not supposed to see that.” Why does she have to have friends who care so much about her love life? 

“Is that Gabe?” Pippa laughs as she squints down at the note.

“I asked him to get flowers because I didn’t know what kind to get.”

Pippa’s grin is visible even in the darkness. “They’re beautiful,” she murmurs. She presses a kiss against Kat’s cheek, and her touch is soft and warm against the breeze of the night. “Thank you, for this.”

They stay up there for hours, eating their way through what feels like pounds and pounds of delicious food as they curl up together and watch the stars. Pippa’s head is a comfortable weight on her shoulder, and they’re so close that Kat can feel it in her own ribs when Pippa laughs. The sky arcs above them, an endless swath of black dotted with with little pinpricks of light, and Pippa points out the constellations she can recognize—Cassiopeia, Virgo, Leo, useless now, because they’re taught from grade school that stars should be projected onto a three-dimensional map meant for warp travel. Kat follows her finger and squints up at the sky, and the more Pippa talks about them, the more she can almost see them. She gets it now, why people want to look at the little white dots in the big bowl above and make them into something, even though their art skills were clearly lacking. Maybe they were just really creative with the proportions of their lions back in the day.

“We’re going to be up there soon,” Pippa breathes.

Kat looks at her, and her eyes are full to the brim with stars, like there’s a whole universe in there, and Kat suddenly can’t _breathe_. She buries her head in the curve of Pippa’s neck and breathes in, cataloguing the impressions of shampoo and laundry soap and tangled hair. Pippa smells like long nights, like the summers Kat’s always wanted to have. The summers she can have now. “Yeah,” Kat whispers. “Yeah, we will.”

“What do you want to do, when you're up there?” Pippa asks, settling back against Kat’s chest.

Kat grins helplessly against her skin. “Everything.”

\-----

They find out that they’re both among the highest-performing cadets of their year when class rankings are released. The Academy, probably fearing new levels of bloodthirst and ambition in its student body, never releases the exact percentile scores for individual students. Cowards, all of them. Kat pouts at the spreadsheet on her PADD. “I want to know who got the higher average,” she announces.

“You really want to petition the dean for a tenth of a point’s difference, Kat?” Pippa asks from where she’s lying with her head in Kat’s lap.

“You afraid I beat you, Georgiou?”

“I just want you to feel good about yourself, Cornwell.”

Kat snorts, closing the rankings table and setting her PADD on the table as she strokes Pippa’s hair where it fans out over her legs. Afsaneh makes gagging sounds. Gabe looks like he wants to take a holo of them. Kat throws one of the pillows on the couch at him and laughs as he splutters.

Their comms all go off in unison, and they jump in unison, scrambling for their PADDs. 

“It’s summer internship assignments,” Afsaneh announces, having gotten to hers first. She’s silent for a moment, and then a smile breaks on her face. “Guess who’s assigned to xenoculture on the Sitting Bull?”

“Hell yeah,” Gabe says, high-fiving her. “I wanted the spot for helms on the Yamato, but the Farragut’s still good.”

Kat’s picked up her PADD, but her hands aren’t moving to open the message. This is it. Beyond the class rankings, beyond the sims and examination scores, this is the ultimate proof of what she’s worth after a year at the Academy. Everyone signs up for the offworld assignments, but only a quarter of the class actually makes the cut to go out into space. The rest are stationed on starbases, or in training labs, and Kat knows that probability isn’t on her side, but she wants to be out there, surrounded by the black, going someplace extraordinary, because she finds that she believes in extraordinary places now—

She taps on the notification.

_Cadet Katrina Cornwell, it is our pleasure to inform you that you have been assigned as an intern to the health services coordinator onboard the USS Intrepid, effective Standard Earth Date 2221.186…_

“Holy shit,” she breathes. Her voice rises until she’s pretty sure their neighbors can hear her, “Sweet fucking—oh, _holy shit_ , I’m on the Intrepid. I got my first choice!”

“So did I,” Pippa shouts, jolting to her feet. Her grin is wide enough to split her face as she does a little shimmy, holding her PADD above her head. “I got the astronavigation spot on the Hiawatha!”

“Fucking stars, Pippa, yes!” Kat tackles her in a hug, and they stumble around the room, holding each other tightly and jumping up and down like kids hyped up on birthday cake, and as Afsaneh and Gabe clap and laugh, they chant _we did it, we did it, we did it!_ until they collapse on the couch again, breathless and giggling and elated.

They made it. They're going into space. It's real. It's all real.

“We,” Kat says as she gulps in breath, half-sprawled over Pippa and feeling like she’s flying, “are going to kick ass up there. We are going to take names. We are going to _ace_ this.”

“Damn straight,” Pippa says.

And they do.

\-----

It ends like this:

“You must be Katrina,” Pippa says, throwing open the door of their new room right after Kat knocks.

“And you must be Philippa,” Kat says. She's smiling so hard that her cheeks hurt. 

Kat can see through the doorway that one wall is already plastered with space posters. Pots of orchids have sprouted all over their windowsills, and the early morning sunlight streams through the open window. Pippa grabs Kat by the shoulders and pulls her inside, tugging her head down until their lips meet and their teeth clack together from their enthusiasm.

It's their second year. The whole wide world is theirs to take, and it's hard to kiss through their laughter, but they try their best. 

The door slams shut behind them.

\-----

Except that's a lie, because it doesn't end there. That's really more of a beginning than an ending, anyways.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for sapphicstartrek's fanwork exchange. I hope you enjoy, indiegal85!
> 
> This is my first time writing Katrina Cornwell and writing Academy fic, and I hope I did them justice. All comments and feedback are appreciated.


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